Tangled Bank Number 64

Welcome to the Neurophilosopher’s weblog, and to the sixty-fourth edition of Tangled Bank, a fortnightly carnival of the best in science, medicine and nature blogging.

First of all, apologies for posting the carnival 2 days late – I got the dates muddled and thought it was due on the 14th! (Thanks Bora.) I was planning to meet Professor Myers at the Natural History Museum tomorrow, but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea!

So let’s get straight down to business, with your unlucky Friday the 13th edition of Tangled Bank. Better late than never.

I’ve arranged the submissions into several categories. Some of them fall into none of the categries, and I’ll start with those.

Earlier this month, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of this years Nobel Prizes. The prize for Physiology or medicine was shared by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of RNA interference.

At Genetics & Health, Hsien has been testing Medstory Beta, an ‘intelligent’ health and medicine search engine which uses AI algorithms to organize search results into categories such as conditions, personal health and procedures, and even provides a list of genes associated with the search term.

I give you a gripping story full of blood and brains, which should really be filed under molecular and cellular biology. But I couldn’t justify a neuroscience category with just one entry, so I’ve categorized it as neuroscience so that I can include a pic of a brain!

And there you have it. Thanks to all the contributors for their submissions. Tangled Bank Number 65 will be at Meta_Analyses on 25th October. Send your submissions to host@tangledbank.net.

I’m hosting Circus of the Spineless at the end of the month, so if you’d like to contribute to that, visit the homepage for details. Finally, I’ll also take this opportunity to plug Encephalon and The Synapse, two neuroscience carnivals, submissions to which have been dwindling recently.

“At Salto Sobrius, Martin is skeptical about ’subjectivity research’ being carried out at the University of Copenhagen. ”

Martin is not being skeptical. Martin is blabbing about it from reading not much more than one website. He’s basically saying he doesn’t get it, he’s not interested in reading up on it, he doesn’t want to look up any definitions, but if no one is going to explain what it is, then he’s going to call it BS. I thought that was an ID strategy…